Soccer Men (19 page)

Kaká joined Milan in 2003. Uniquely in soccer, the team has barely changed since then. Have his colleagues here at Milanello become more than just colleagues? “Milan is a big family. In the year, I think, the same time I spend with my wife I spend here with my friends. The day before the game, we stay here in training camp. If we got sixty games in the whole season, there’s another sixty days in camp, and every day training.” The “feeling” between him and his fellow midfielders, he adds, “is abnormal. We’ve been playing together for five years, and now I know how Gattuso moves, Pirlo, Seedorf. We can play without seeing each other.”

But is it hard to get motivated for sixty games a season? “Sometimes it’s too much,” Kaká agrees. “Every time we play in Champions League, we always have motivation and concentration. Champions League is always important because you have to win, every game. Championship—you have to win every game, but sometimes you don’t have the motivation that you have against Inter, Juventus, Rome, and Champions League games.” He is presumably referring to games in half-full stadiums in provincial Italian towns with hooligans throwing things.

Is that why Milan is only fifth in the Italian championship? “Errm, yeah, I think,” he says with an embarrassed chuckle.

The question of motivation preoccupies Kaká. When he arrived at Milanello, he says, he noticed a curious quality about Milan’s legendary defender Paolo Maldini: Every day, the guy wanted to win. “This surprised me,” says Kaká. “For that I learn everything about Paolo. Why he’s got this motivation, and the other players don’t.” It may explain why Maldini at thirty-nine is now in his twenty-third season on the first team.

Did Maldini tell him the secret? “No, I just observed him. He speaks
poco—
not very much.”

Who are the talkers in Milan’s locker room?

“The tookers?” Kaká is baffled, and Phil clarifies. “The talkers? Ahh, Ronaldo, Gattuso.”

Kaká once thought of getting an MBA. Like many corporate types he motivates himself by setting himself objectives. But what objectives can he possibly have now that he has won everything? His habitual grin grows to cover the whole porcelain face. “I want to win everything again. World Cup, and Champions League, championship and Golden Ball, World FIFA Player of the Year, and . . .” He trails off, possibly because the list is endless. “These are the things I learned with Paolo. Always win.”

*Two days after I published this article in the
Financial Times
, I got a panicked e-mail from one of Milan’s press officers. Where could he get a copy of the newspaper? They’d all be gone now, I said, and offered to e-mail him the article instead.

No, he said, Kaká wanted the actual paper. The player was very keen to read the article in the
Financial Times
itself. Milan’s players spend endless hours before games in training camp at Milanello, and Kaká likes to spend the time practicing his English. What better study material than a profile of yourself?

February 2008

A
rsenal had won yet again, and Arsène Wenger, their manager, was loafing in the players’ tunnel, relaxed, or as relaxed as Wenger ever gets. His prodigy, Cesc Fabregas, had scored again. An acquaintance of Wenger’s, who
also happened to be in the tunnel, asked why it was that Fabregas—always a wonderful passer and tackler—was now scoring too.

“I’ll tell you a story about that,” replied Wenger. “I told him this summer, ‘The number on your back is 4 [traditionally the defensive midfielder’s number]. So at Arsenal you’ll be judged on your defensive positions, the tackles you make. Get that right, and the passes and goals will look after themselves.”

From then on the boy began scoring. Wenger’s point was that he had taken the pressure off Cesc’s goals by telling him to worry about something else.

The manager paused, before adding his punch line: “Last year he missed thirteen [or however many it was] scoring opportunities.” Wenger loves stats at least as much as he loves soccer.

Now his twenty-year-old Catalan is the complete player, who over the next three months will be central to deciding whether Arsenal wins the Premier League and Champions League. More than that, Fabregas represents a new shape of player: the little boy as leader.

Though Barcelona is a giant club, Catalonia hardly ever produces great players. There was excitement, therefore, when a fifteen-year-old urchin who had first watched Barça as a baby in his grandfather’s arms was seen passing balls like a quarterback in the club’s “Masia,” or farmhouse, for young players.

Then Arsenal stole him. With hindsight that was inevitable. Like the old East German Stasi, Arsenal’s scouting team sees everything. In 1999 I went to watch South Africa under-seventeens play Zimbabwe under-seventeens in a little Soweto stadium. It was a scary time and place, and a marginal match, but in the main stand were five other white men: Arsenal coaches who had landed at the Johannesburg airport that morning.

The Arsenal scout who spotted Fabregas was Francis Cagigao. The son of Spaniards who emigrated to London in the 1970s, Cagigao played for Arsenal in the FA Youth Cup final of 1988, but now scours Europe for Wenger.

Soon after Fabregas was spotted, he became Arsenal’s youngest-ever debutant, at sixteen. Then he was Spain’s youngest international in seventy years. It all seemed odd. The teenage Fabregas was built like a waif and stood barely five feet seven. “An unproven featherweight,” wrote his then team-mate Ashley Cole.

In those days, way back in 2005 or 2006, the central midfield in soccer was like the line of scrimmage in American football, a “pit” where monsters like Arsenal’s Patrick Vieira (six foot three) roamed. The physical takeover of soccer, as in most sports from tennis to baseball, looked unstoppable.

Yet in just two years it has been reversed. The turning point occurred in Berlin just after half past six the night on June 30, 2006, during the match between Germany and Argentina at the last World Cup, when the Argentine coach, Jose Pekerman, sent on his big striker, Julio Ricardo Cruz (six foot two), instead of Cesc’s old Masia playmate Lionel Messi (five foot six, thanks to growth hormones). Messi with his small turning circle would have twisted the giant German central defenders silly. But they ate up Cruz, and Germany knocked out Argentina. The era of the boy had begun.

At Arsenal, Fabregas has replaced Vieira in the central midfield. The Catalan, now about five foot nine but still built like a waif, has led a featherweight conquest of Europe’s biggest clubs: Messi, Bojan, and Andrés Iniesta are at Barcelona; Robinho and Wesley Sneijder at Real Madrid; Carlos Tévez at Manchester United; Diego at Werder Bremen; Franck Ribéry at Bayern Munich; and Sergio Agüero at Atletico Madrid. All of them are five foot six. France’s new playmaker Samir Nasri is five foot eight, but a waif like Fabregas. None of them is older than twenty-four.

It turns out that amid the galloping supermen of modern soccer, only little men slight enough to twist can find the remaining inches of space. That’s why French coach Raynald Denoueix says clubs are now scouting shorties. Small is beautiful.

Robin van Persie, Arsenal’s Dutch forward, explains this eloquently. “Cesc is slow,” he told the Dutch magazine
Hard Gras.
“He’s one of the slowest here. But he’s still the quickest of us all. He always thinks two seconds ahead. I sometimes think, ‘Why doesn’t the opponent take the ball off him?’ And there he comes, peep, with a very little feint. In training I catch up with him and think, ‘Now I’ll get you.’ And with his toe he gives—peep—a very little pass for a one-two. That gets him another metre and a half. So irritating!”

A week before Arsenal and Milan drew 0–0 in the Champions League, Milan’s Kaká told me that Cesc was “a new generation of player.” “I mean,” Kaká explained, “He’s complete. He can defend, he can attack, he’s got a
good shot with his right, with his left. He can do everything. Modern player.” Of course, Cesc’s still a good seven years off his peak.

March 2008

A
ccording to the etiquette for international players, being two hours late for a meeting with someone from outside soccer does not count as late. So the twenty or so photographers, wardrobe dressers, PR reps, and representatives of CNN, the world’s worst television station, start to get antsy only when Nicolas Anelka’s delay enters its third hour. We are waiting for the great man in a studio in North London, where he is to do a fashion shoot for his new clothing line and explain how the most expensive player in history aims to spend what should finally be the peak years of his career.

Everyone sits around exchanging bored sports-and-film gossip and eating cake. Eventually, the CNN crew has to leave. They arrange for a PR woman who happens to be around to do the interview instead. Such are the rigors of world-class reporting.

Anelka arrives four hours late, without apologies. The rumor is that he had some physiotherapy at Chelsea, but nobody has bothered telling us. He is ushered into the wardrobe room to don his first outfit. And as soon as he starts to undress, you understand why he feels he has the right to waste the afternoon of twenty London yuppies: What a body! Sprinters’ legs, the upper torso of a basketball player, on top a thin and fragile shaven head, and the whole coated the color of milk chocolate. No fat; just fast-twitch muscle. Anelka strips down to a tiny pair of briefs, watched closely by a Swedish PR woman, a gay fashion worker, and
Player
magazine. What is his waist size? Thirty-four inches, the same as
Player
magazine’s, even though Anelka at six foot one is four and a half inches taller.

Over the next hour, while Anelka poses in various outfits, and gets dressed and undressed again, he explains why he has had such a weird career, and whether in the next two years, perhaps playing a new position, he can redeem it and convert himself from one of the great players of our time into one of the great achievers.

But first, that body.

“No,” says Anelka, in a thin, reedy voice that you sometimes have to strain to hear. “When I started soccer, when I came to Clairefontaine, the best [soccer] school in France, I was small and—how do you say?” he holds his thumb and forefinger very narrowly apart. Despite a decade in English soccer, Anelka can hardly speak an English sentence without an error.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. And my brothers, they are smaller than me. And they are older than me. So I don’t know how I became like that, but I think it’s because I work every day. It’s not like I was already strong and tall.”

Anelka was born twenty-nine years ago in Versailles, the son of a civil servant from the French Antilles. He grew up a few miles from Louis XIV’s palace, in one of France’s
banlieues
, or immigrant ghettos. This is of course the standard origin for top French players. In fact, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry grew up near Anelka in poor
banlieues
in the same generally rich region west of Paris.

In 1998 the three youngsters were part of a group of friends who laughed together, listened to music in the evenings, and generally kept each other company in the French squad at Clairefontaine, as they waited to see which of them would make the final cut for the World Cup. Anelka was only nineteen but already France’s most gifted center-forward. “I remember he didn’t need to work as hard as others,” Vieira records in his autobiography. The day Anelka was cut from France’s squad, he packed and left at once.

Anelka is famously a loner, but when I asked him if it was possible to have friends in soccer, he said, “I have some friends in soccer. It is people I know from maybe ten years.”

“I think so, because I know them since I was kid, so I think it’s more simple.”

He has said elsewhere that he has lost his presoccer friends from his youth in the
banlieue
—not because he changed, he insists, but because they began to regard him differently when he became a star.

Anelka was only seventeen when Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger, poached him from Paris St. Germain’s youth team for just under $800,000. And the sad fact is that although he left Highbury at twenty, he arguably had the best years of his career there. The teenage Anelka had the pace of an Olympic sprinter, plus technique. Playing in front of Dennis Bergkamp’s passes helped too. He has never since beaten his seventeen league goals of the 1998–1999 season when Arsenal won the English double. After he scored twice for France against England at Wembley in early 1999, French captain Didier Deschamps remarked, “Now we have our Ronaldo.” (Few people then gave much thought to Henry, a fragile winger sitting on Juventus’s bench.)

France, who had won the World Cup in 1998 without a striker, was now complete. You could hardly wait for all the World Cups Anelka would play. To date, he has played zero.

In the summer of 1999, Anelka made the decision that changed his career: He left Arsenal for Real Madrid, for $35 million. Wenger has called Anelka the best natural finisher he had worked with and said that his departure was his biggest regret as a manager. Vieira’s verdict: “He made a big mistake in leaving.”

“No. I think I can learn myself. You know, soccer is not about one coach. It’s about . . .” But just as Anelka is about to explain what soccer is about, he is interrupted by photographers shouting instructions on posing. The flashes pop. Anelka continues, “He’s a good manager. Sometimes you make your decision, and you make your decision. And that’s it.” Anelka is not the type to admit any sort of dependence on anyone in soccer.